Past Progress: Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea

By Ed Pulford

While anxiety abounds in the old Cold War West that progress – whether political or economic – has been reversed, for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories are nothing new. Grounded in the multiethnic frontier town of Hunchun at the triple border of China, Russia, and North Korea, Ed Pulford traces how several of global history's most ambitiously totalizing progressive endeavors have ended in cataclysmic collapse here. From the Japanese empire which banished Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynastic histories from the region, through Chinese, Soviet, and Korean socialisms, these borderlands have seen projections and disintegrations of forward-oriented ideas accumulate on a grand scale.

Taking an archaeological approach to notions of historical progress, the book's three parts follow an innovative structure moving backwards through linear time. Part I explores "post-historical" Hunchun's diverse sociopolitics since high socialism's demise. Part II covers the socialist era, discussing cross-border temporal synchrony between China, Russia, and North Korea. Finally, Part III treats the period preceding socialist revolutions, revealing how the collapse of Qing, Tsarist, and Choson dynasties marked a compound "end of history" which opened the area to projections of modernity and progress. Examining a borderland across linguistic, cultural, and historical lenses, Past Progress is a simultaneously local and transregional analysis of time, borders, and the state before, during, and since socialism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: May 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9781503639034

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Past Progress

Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea

ED PULFORD

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2024 by Ed Pulford. All rights reserved.

Parts of Chapter 2 were previously published as Differences over Difference: Sino-Russian Friendship at Interstate and Interpersonal Scales. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 63(3), 685–721. © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417521000189. (Reproduced with permission.)

Parts of Chapter 4 were previously published as On frontiers and fronts: bandits, partisans and Manchuria’s borders, 1900–1949. Modern China Vol. 47 No. 5, pp. 662–697. Copyright © 2021 (Ed Pulford). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0097700420913523. (Reproduced with permission.)

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pulford, Ed, author.

Title: Past progress : time and politics at the borders of China, Russia, and Korea / Ed Pulford.

Other titles: Time and politics at the borders of China, Russia, and Korea

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023034596 (print) | LCCN 2023034597 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503638181 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503639027 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503639034 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Socialism—China—History. | Socialism—Russia (Federation)—History. | Socialism—Korea (North)—History. | Borderlands—Political aspects—China—History. | Borderlands—Political aspects—Russia (Federation)—History. | Borderlands—Political aspects—Korea (North)—History. | Hunchun Shi (China)—History. | Hunchun Shi (China)—Relations. | Hunchun Shi (China)—Politics and government. | Hunchun Shi (China)—Ethnic relations.

Classification: LCC DS797.59.H86 P85 2024 (print) | LCC DS797.59.H86 (ebook) | DDC 320.530947—dc23/eng/20230824

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034596

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023034597

Cover design: Michel Vrana / Black Eye Design

Typeset by Newgen in Brill 10/15

CONTENTS

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Linguistic Conventions

Introduction: Progresses Past and Present

PART I: POSTHISTORY

1. Postsocialism’s Temporal Collisions

2. Friends and Coevals

PART II: HISTORY

3. Socialism in Several Countries

4. Seizing Socialist Time Sovereignty

PART III: PREHISTORY

5. Ends and Beginnings of Frontier History

Conclusion: History’s Lines and Loops

Appendix A: Transcription Glossary

Appendix B: Titles of Selected Treaties between China, Russia, and Korea

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE I.1: Xi Jinping in Yanbian

FIGURE I.2: Hunchun, Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture and Jilin province in northeast Asia

FIGURE I.3: The cross-border Hunchun area

FIGURE I.4: Hunchun streetscape and multilingual shop signage

FIGURE I.5: Kraskino’s slump

FIGURE 1.1: New apartments march out of eastern Hunchun

FIGURE 1.2: Unfinished ruins near Hunchun Development Zone

FIGURE 1.3: Building site hoardings showing Hunchun region

FIGURE 2.1: Central Hunchun hotels

FIGURE 2.2: Publicity image for Vladivostok tour company Roads of the World

FIGURE 2.3: Flyer for tours to Vladivostok depicting Russia’s National History Museum

FIGURE 3.1: The Great Soviet Union graphic

FIGURE 3.2: A rare encounter by Nan Xiuji

FIGURE 4.1: Woods and taiga in southern Primorye east of Hunchun

FIGURE 4.2: Martyrs stele at East Battery

FIGURE 4.3: Wangjaesan Grand Monument

FIGURE 4.4: Monument commemorating Great Patriotic War and Battle of Khasan, Slavianka, Russia

FIGURE 5.1: View from Fangchuan depicted in the tourist brochure New Focus of Northeast Asia: Hunchun

FIGURE 5.2: Ornamental paper cuts of Changbaishan and Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao

FIGURE C.1: Publicity shots for men and women of Hunchun Frontier Inspection Station

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Similar to, although less globally momentous than, the grand projects that are discussed in the pages to come, this book is the product of many overlapping periods of imperfect progress and enduring human relationships. The webs of friendship, intellectual indebtedness, camaraderie, and kinship, which, despite changes in location, occupation, and spells of state-mandated dissociation, have made life meaningful and fun over recent years, matter more to me than completing this compilation of accreted thoughts.

The most indispensable interlocutors, friends, and contributors to the project that has become this book are those who have shared their time, ideas, and in some cases also their homes, biscuits, cars, patience, lesson notes, thingies for crimping dumplings, spare football shirts, and travel tips over many years in the tri-country area that has the town of Hunchun at its center. My cross-border fieldwork here, which I unwittingly began in 2007–08 during a year studying Chinese in Vladivostok, has incurred too many debts of gratitude to enumerate, and whether mentioned (pseudonymously) in this book or not, those who live in this culturally very rich but also not always especially freewheeling part of the world deserve the largest share of my appreciation.

Coming a close second are the people who were around when much of the groundwork for what follows was laid down in a windy medieval town that pokes out of the fens of eastern England. Like so many before me, I cannot express the depth of my thanks for the generosity and guidance of my doctoral supervisor, Caroline Humphrey. Also critical (in both the positive and the negative-but-still-positive senses) since the early stages of my research have been Susan Bayly, Teo Benussi, Franck Billé, Uradyn Bulag, Adam Yuet Chau, Joe Ellis, Jana Howlett, Heonik Kwon, Shuai Li, José Ciro Martínez, Michał Murawski, Sayana Namsaraeva, Hyun-Gwi Park, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, Beth Turk, Sören Urbansky, Michael Vine, Emma Widdis, Hugh Williamson, Jamie Wintrup, and Ruiyi Zhu.

People who belong broadly among the above group but deserve special thanks because they have, for one reason or another, read large sections or earlier versions of this book are David Sneath, Charles Stafford, and Tom White. I have received funding for the research that went into this project from the UK Economics and Social Research Council, the Academy of Korean Studies, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and European Research Council.

Both during and since my PhD I have been very fortunate to have opportunities to discuss the cross-border region on which this book focuses with scholars based much closer to it than I am now. Conversations with Roman Avilov at the Russian Academy of Science’s Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography of the Peoples of the Far East, and Xing Guangcheng, Chu Dongmei, and Lü Wenli at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Border History and Geography Research Unit in Beijing stand out in particular. My Chinese- and Korean-language teachers at Yanbian University, Wuhan University, Xinjiang University, and the then-Far Eastern National University in Vladivostok also merit thanks for giving me the tools to understand more about this part of the world, and for not being too upset when I made confusing tone errors or asked why the chosen class monitor (banzhang) wasn’t any of the people who had put themselves forward for the post.

The realization of this project would not have been possible without spells of pre- and postdoctoral research in Seoul at the Academy of Korean Studies, in Sapporo at Hokkaido University’s Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, and at (if rarely physically in) the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Thanks to my hosts at each, Young-Kyun Yang, Akihiro Iwashita, and Shanshan Lan. In these places I also spent fun times with and learned plenty from Assel Bitabarova, Ted Boyle, Jonathan Bull, Aldina Camenisch, Naomi Chi, Paul Hansen, Christina Kefala, Susanne Klien, James Letson, Raviv Litman, Ke Ma, Norihiro Naganawa & Mihoko Kato, Svetlana Paichadze, Willy Sier, Émile St-Pierre, Willem van Schendel, and David Wolff.

Elsewhere in the world, I am very grateful to Jeff Wasserstrom for his support and generosity ever since I rather bluntly approached him during a visit to Cambridge in 2016. Cross-continental chats and/or carousing with Andray Abrahamian, Sam Bass, Darren Byler, Adam Cathcart, Anthony Cho, Josh Freeman, Martin Fromm, Chris Green, Kelly Hammond, Koji Hirata, Loretta Kim, June Hee Kwon, Andrei Lankov, Nicholas Loubere, Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi, Chuck Kraus, Frankie Martin, Lisa Min, James Meador, Dean Ouellette, Andrea Pia, Maria Repnikova, Dana Salimjan, Alek Sigley, Tabitha Speelman, Marina Svensson, Ed Tyerman, Benno Weiner, Noriko Unno, Peter Ward, Melissa Wrapp, Di Wu, and Jerry Zee have hugely enriched my first years of academic work. Thanks also to Marshall Poe of the New Books Network for his seemingly superhuman podcast-producing capacities. Thank you to the team at Stanford University Press, and particularly to Dylan Kyung-lim White for his support and thoughtful editorial comments as I completed this book, and to the anonymous reviewers who helped me improve the manuscript.

Other friends who have contributed—knowingly or otherwise—to my ideas and/or sanity while completing this work include Arnet Addis, Victoria Brudenell, Polly Dickson, Burak Gürel, Tom Hancock, Jeff James, Myk Jelenic, Jake Leland, George Marshall, Honesty Pern, Kostya and Polina Petrenko, Ryan Rafaty, Paul Richardson, Rob Stockill, Artyom Surikov, James Waddell, and Jahongir Yakubov.

Since September 2020 I have been at (and for the most part also in) the University of Manchester, where my experience has been improved by Erica Baffelli, Elena Barabantseva, Jeff Barda, Aoife Cantrill, Sonja Dobroski, Jamie Doucette, Ablimit Baki Elterish, Peter Gries, Aya Homei, Rob Hume, Steve Hutchings, Sherlock Tianshu Liu, Méadhbh McIvor, Carwyn Morris, Laura Murphy, Sorcha Scarff, Gregory Scott, Jolynna Sinanan, David Stroup, Pao-chen Tang, Rian Thum, David Tobin, Vera Tolz, Mark Usher, Soumhya Venkatesan, Tao Wang, Zhaokun Xin, and Amy Zhang.

One very good thing about being in Manchester rather than, say, Urumqi, Khabarovsk, or Sapporo has been proximity to the people who matter to me most of all and whom I love with a depth and permanence that state socialism could only dream of. Hopefully you don’t need reminding of this Mum, Dave, Dids, James, Saz, Will, Mike, Rebs, and Evan, but you are the best. Not that it’s a competition, but Tom, Jack, Al, Em, Charlotte, Amy, and Clio, you are also very good. In 2021–22 as this book was entering its long home straight both my Granny and my Grannie passed away a few months apart from one another. This book is dedicated to their memory.

Any deficiencies in what follows are not the responsibility of anyone mentioned here.

LINGUISTIC CONVENTIONS

Original language terms are used throughout this book where deemed useful. Chinese is denoted by (Ch.), Russian (Rus.) and Korean (Kor.) and, infrequently, Manchu (Man.) Japanese (Ja.), and Ukrainian (Ukr.). These are omitted where it is obvious from context which language is being used.

Chinese words are written in the body text using standard pinyin transcription.

Korean is rendered using McCune-Reischauer (M-R) romanization. While the official South Korean Revised Romanization system is preferred by some, I have chosen M-R because a version of it is still current in North Korea and Yanbian, China. Further, where words differ in spelling or pronunciation in the DPRK/Yanbian compared to South Korea, the former has been used, e.g., ryŏksa (martyr) not yŏksa, Rajin not Najin etc.

For Chinese and, where relevant, Korean and Japanese, a glossary for cross-referencing pinyin/M-R terms with their characters is provided as an appendix. Occasionally Sinographs or Hangeul/Chosŏn’gŭl are used in the body text where they have immediate analytical relevance.

Russian is transcribed using the American Library Association-Library of Congress (ALA-LC) system. Based on personal preference, in place and personal names I have omitted the apostrophe [’] denoting a soft sign and have rendered Cyrillic [e] and [ë] as ye and yo where it seems important that readers know how a name is actually pronounced (thus Primorye instead of Primor’e, Posyot instead of Pos’et etc.). Elsewhere these characters have been transcribed as ALA-LC normally requires.

Manchu, where cited (mostly secondhand references from English- or Chinese-language texts) is transliterated following the Möllendorff system. At times, words (mostly toponyms) with a Manchu or other Tungusic origin are only extant in the historical record in Sinographs. In such cases I settle for transcribing these into pinyin. Japanese is transcribed according to the Hepburn system.

Persons and places with established transliterated names that do not conform to the above, for example St. Petersburg, Tolstoy, Kim Il Sung, or Seoul, have been retained as such. East Asian personal names, be they historical persons or cited authors, have been rendered surname-first except in cases where a scholar publishes in English under given-name-first ordering.

All translations are my own except where otherwise specified.

INTRODUCTION

Progresses Past and Present

Being the outgoing type, madamae¹ was keenly interested in all the concentric circles of events that radiated out around her. Much of what she observed, from new products in her hometown Hunchun to infrastructural developments in Yanbian prefecture and Jilin province, and national achievements across China, indicated that life was improving. Indeed, the only real clouds on this expansive horizon loomed at the most grandiose and the most mundane ends of the spectrum as, in their own ways, global geopolitics and the leak that her anthropologist houseguest had somehow caused in her bathroom threatened to pincer her cheery outlook. During the months in 2014–15 that I spent living with madamae in Hunchun, which lies in a Korean region of China on the country’s northeastern borders with Russia and North Korea,² our conversations flitted seamlessly between affairs at these various scales of focus. Warp to the weft of a home life of studying, cooking, eating, socializing, watching television, and visits from madamae’s Korean- and Chinese-speaking friends and family, the macro and the micro collapsed together, and so even the most abstract international matters entered the intimate confines of her light- and houseplant-filled apartment.

Our days together would usually begin with a dawn visit to the East Market, where madamae rhapsodized at the range of goods on offer. Aside from the natural greens from the wooded hills around Hunchun, every conceivable vegetable and animal product was now available and affordable. Even beggars can eat meat these days, she said, adding that local people’s palates had expanded to include Russian and North Korean seafood, and dishes from distant southern China.

When her daughter, son-in-law, and twelve-year-old grandson came to visit on evenings and weekends, madamae would marvel at the extracurricular activities Byŏngnam had been volunteered for, from Chinese flute (dizi) to supplementary English composition classes. Young people had so many opportunities these days: Byŏngnam’s exhausted expression presumably just showed that he lacked the historical perspective to see how lucky he was.

Like much of Hunchun’s population, madamae’s family belonged to China’s ethnically Korean (Kor. Chosŏnjok, Ch. Chaoxianzu) community, and so peninsular matters were high on the conversational agenda at home. No one had a particularly positive opinion of Kim Jong Un, but madamae did think his wife was beautiful and felt North Korea deserved China’s help in resisting American imperialism. Indeed, as an avid viewer of China Central Television’s national Xinwen lianbo news show, on at 7:00 p.m. each evening after the local Yanbian TV Korean-language news, she knew that US meddling was an issue for China too. Why can’t America or Japan just respect the world’s second biggest economy and its technology, now admired by Africans, Europeans, Asians, and the Soviets alike? madamae wondered, using a term still commonly applied to Russians in northeast China. US provocations in the South China Sea were a cause of particular indignation.

But it was an aqueous rather than a maritime incident that offered clearest evidence of the fact that—in borderland settings like Hunchun—the local is often international. The leak, caused by cracks in the bathtub where I showered, and grounds for loud stairwell rows between madamae and her—also Chosŏnjok—downstairs neighbor had been a problem for a while, and eventually some men came to inspect it. Madamae at first mistook one of them for a fellow Korean. But her respectful greeting, annyŏnghasupnikka, fell on deaf ears: he was Han Chinese, he said apologetically, ancestrally from Shandong province, though he added by way of consolation that he had at least been to North Korea. People there seemed politer than in China, he felt, but for some reason they use US dollars for everything and eat food donated from here: perhaps their Military First policy means they give all their money to the army, but either way they’re not very developed. The plumber had got a similar impression of the other neighbors when, before marrying in the 1980s, he had spent three years working in the USSR. How could the Soviets be so unable to look after themselves that he and other Hunchun people had to go and do construction there? It was baffling. Construction was key to a country’s success, he reflected, and neither the Soviets nor the Koreans were doing too well at that these days. But this thought perhaps reminded him of what he was in the apartment for, and he hurried to help his repairman colleague, who was now sprawled clanking around under the bathtub.

The plumber’s comments both exemplified the cross-border perspective of many ordinary people in Hunchun today and alluded tellingly to the (post)socialist forces that have redefined relations between China, Russia, and Korea, and wrought dizzying changes to Hunchun’s place in national, regional, and global affairs in recent decades. As phenomena that speak to anthropological concerns over how time is understood in the context of grand state projects and across international borders, such themes will be central to this book. Indeed, my very presence in the town further reflected these transformational trends. The name of the surrounding Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture means along the border and thus suggests a certain remoteness, but gaggles of cosmopolitan outsiders, from the central PRC authorities to officials, businesspeople, journalists, and researchers from numerous countries, have of late been descending on Hunchun, performing the opening up of this formerly out-of-the-way locale. Some of this began well before I started conducting fieldwork here in 2013, as from the 1990s state-backed initiatives sought to make Hunchun a transnational hub for postsocialist Northeast Asian cooperation. Discussed further below, this improbable ambition at the nexus of three countries with discordant approaches to borders, mobility, and capital was a spark for my own anthropological and historical interest in this cultural and geopolitical crossroads.

A true high point in Yanbian’s rise to prominence came in July 2015 when, much to madamae’s delight, none other than Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping arrived on an inspection tour. For two days around the visit she sat glued to the television and her mobile phone, scanning social media app WeChat for evidence that he would appear in Hunchun. He has to see the triple border at Fangchuan, she said, referring to the spot where China, North Korea, and Russia all actually meet, now a popular tourist site. Rumors of Xi’s arrival had sparked a flurry of anticipatory activity throughout town, including the re-asphalting of road near the bus station that seemed not to need re-asphalting, and the hanging of hundreds of red PRC flags on wires across the streets. But such efforts failed to conjure Xi, whose itinerary remained limited to prefectural capital Yanji around 70 km away, and some nearby farms. As this reality sank in late on the second day, madamae’s spirits dipped, and after bedtime that evening I could still hear her through the wall rewatching a shaky seven-second video snatched on one Yanji resident’s phone. In the clip Xi strolled the streets surrounded by twirling female dancers in Korean chosŏn’ot,³ an emissary from the center vaunted at the nation’s margins. Buttressing this impression, bucolic ethnic elements featured in imagery shared on local government WeChat accounts during the visit (fig. I.1).⁴ Other Chinese Korean friends of mine reacted more sarcastically, coding mockery of Xi’s theatrical leadership cult by referring to him as Sŭp Taedae 습대대, a nonsensical Chosŏn’gŭl rendering of his official Chinese nickname Xi Dada (Daddy Xi). But madamae, who saw in Xi echoes of her favorite leader Mao Zedong, was amazed he had been so close to her long-neglected hometown.

FIGURE I.1: Xi Jinping in Yanbian. Retrieved from Hunchun local government public WeChat account; additional source in endnote 4.

Taken together, these diffuse notes on events large and small in Hunchun lead to an observation that will be key to this book’s focus on time and its shifting anthropological meanings at various political scales: the tumultuous changes that have brought material abundance, high-level attention, and shifting border-crossing opportunities to Hunchun have, for many among the town’s multiethnic Korean, Han Chinese, Russian, and Manchu population, engendered a particular worldview tethered to ideas of progress. Borne along by senses of outward expansivism and forward movement which exist in both official and vernacular forms, Hunchun people today commonly understand their transforming material and sociopolitical lives, and relations with cross-border neighbors, in terms of development (Ch. fazhan, Kor. palchŏn); the construction (jianshe, kŏnsŏl) invoked by the plumber; and progress (jinbu, chinbo) itself. In doing so they engage a distinctive borderland variant of a mood that has pervaded China over the past three decades. As anthropologists and other scholars of Chinese historical and temporal experience have noted, increased wealth, infrastructural improvement, and constant building have fed into a nationwide affect which Anna Greenspan (2014) calls futurity, sweeping up hundreds of millions of people in a whorl of change. In a state whose economy was, until the 2020s, growing by 8–10 percent annually, even the blandest efforts by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to yoke everyday change to official visions of national advancement have gained vernacular credence. Such tendencies have emerged in other developmentalist postsocialist settings too: as Erik Harms (2016: 32) notes, residents of transforming Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, interpret the construction (and destruction) around them in terms that echo government and corporate narratives, even if no one ever forced anyone to tell the story in this way. The idea of grand-scale progress attracts less everyday cynicism or ambivalence in reformed socialist contexts today than it does in, for example, Euro-America or the former Soviet Union. Straightforwardly depoliticized and culturally non-relativized framings of progress abound in China, shorn of analyses that might interrogate progress’s costs or ask whether all of society’s class, ethnic, or other constituencies benefit equally. As in Vietnam, a public trained for decades in socialist critiques of capitalism nevertheless enthuses about processes that interloping intellectuals might call neoliberal (Harms 2016: 6).

Yet if much of this is as present in Hunchun as elsewhere, progress also acquires a distinctive borderland valence here. Evident along two interrelated axes, this distinctiveness results both from how incongruent this positivism is within Hunchun’s historical setting, and from how sharply it contrasts with the atmosphere over state borders. It is precisely this that makes Hunchun an ideal setting from which to ask questions about progress-rooted thinking, questions that apply well beyond the northeast Chinese, or the postsocialist, context.

Firstly, if Hunchun presents rosy prospects to many among its municipal population of 229,000 today (Jilin 2018), then even cursory consideration of local borderland pasts makes such views surprising. Today’s pervasive progressivism builds substantially on teleological notions of advancement which were shared by both the Cold War’s twentieth-century camps but were promoted with particular force under Chinese, Soviet, and Korean state socialisms. As a result, with Maoist, Soviet, and Kimist utopian orthodoxies each having crumbled since the 1980s, Hunchun has had a unique vantage point on the illusory promises of linear historical thinking. Even if the three variously postsocialist states which today sandwich the town continue to pose revisionist challenges to the late-capitalist West’s sense of where history is going, these lack the ideological, intellectual, or internationalist coherence of high socialism. Still more strikingly, Hunchun’s deeper—but not distant—local pasts offer further examples of progress’s shortcomings in numerous cultural and political inflections. Before Cold War historical materialism, this was a key site within the conquest-evolutionist nineteenth- to twentieth-century Russian and Japanese empires, and before that the seventeenth- to eighteenth-century flourishing of Manchu-Qing and Korean Chosŏn states under cyclical visions of dynastic rise and decline. With these grand endeavors also having come up short, the town’s main demographic groups, be they Chosŏnjok (36%), Han Chinese (Ch. Hanzu, 53%), Manchu (Ch. Manzu, 10%), or Russian (a visible minority of several hundred) (Jilin 2018), have witnessed a three-hundred-year cascade of sometimes compatible, sometimes discordant visions of expansion and advancement: cross-border state socialism’s demise was only the most recent end of history to reverberate here.

This leads to my second observation regarding progress’s distinctiveness in Hunchun. In a multiethnic borderland like this, seemingly depoliticized and deculturalized visions of improvement and advancement like those sweeping China today are forcibly politicized and culturized through everyday contact with other temporal frames across international and interethnic boundaries, and backwards through time. The nearby Sino-Korean and Sino-Russian borders (drawn in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, respectively) are linear inscriptions of Hunchun’s long-standing status as a site of convergence for lofty imperial-national endeavors, but collisions among these have invariably emerged in more prosaically haphazard form on the ground. As Marshall Sahlins (1985: viii) notes—drawing on a historically momentous episode when indigenous Hawaiians met and killed British imperial navigator Captain Cook—everyday cross-cultural encounters that occur amid epochal historical change are, for ordinary people, both "confrontation[s] with an external world that has its own imperious determinations and with other people who have their own parochial intentions" (my stress). Over time Chinese, Korean, Russian, and Manchu people around Hunchun have both lived out grand statist or imperial projects of progress and expansion, and interacted in vernacular ways with representatives of other linguistic, cultural, and ethnic groups. These multi-scalar encounters have lent rich local texture to imperious, expansive temporal ideas. As I will show, it is precisely everyday manifestations of progressive notions in a variety of culturally and ideologically inflected forms that have made them so tenacious, both within communities and as pivots in cross-border relationships.

Hunchun people over time have thus engaged with a succession of what Ann Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter Perdue (2007) call imperial formations. Allowing comparison among empires beyond fetishized Western archetypes (Shih 2011), Stoler et al.’s anthro-historical framing encourages us to trace continuities and connections among apparently disparate colonial, national, socialist, or capitalist projects and their shared expansionist impulses to forge fields of meaning, dispossession, and dominance, including in the temporal realm. For many in and around Hunchun today, being propelled to the center of intersecting official and media gazes seems a significant break with a local sense of remoteness within such projects. If one has internalized the perspective of a given political center, seeing the world in terms of discrete, bordered polities—as government cadres, journalists, many social scientists, and indeed modern subjects at large do—then Hunchun looks destined to have played a marginal role in political, social, and economic schemes sweeping northeast Asia since the town’s 1714 foundation as a Qing garrison. Of course, for its own population this is the center of countless domestic and parochial worlds. But local multiethnic residents have all been interpolated over the last three centuries by imperious views that locate the focus of authentic national stories elsewhere. Bianjiang or frontier remains a common term used locally to describe this area,⁵ suggesting that, much as China came to be seen as Oriental by Chinese people themselves under nineteenth-century Euro-American spatial hegemony (Xiaomei Chen 1995), Hunchun people have had their sense of place peripheralized by state-centrism. Until the 1990s, entering the town required that one show a border pass (bianjingzheng) proving residency as fears of Soviet or North Korean spies created a sealed-off (fengbi) atmosphere.⁶ Yet, as Stoler and McGranahan (2007: 10) argue, even if a polity’s strained efforts to assert itself at its margins may reflect the paranoia of imperial failure, perceived edge spaces are often where a formation’s most intensely revealing work of arranging, categorizing, and dislocating occurs. Hunchun people’s engagements with progress over time straddle these mutually constituting poles of marginality and centrality to wider projects, producing entangled temporal and spatial effects: recent movement into an age of material plenty and openness is experienced both as a forward leap in time, and as a shift in imagined location from periphery to vanguard of national and—given the proximity of borders—international affairs. This emic sense of emergence to the front stage, far from the first in Hunchun’s history, serves its own injunction to study politically inflected experiences of time here.

With contemporary life in Hunchun as a starting point, this book thus focuses on the cross-border inflections and layered histories of progress as a component of identity on multiple scales. In doing so I show that—here and across space and time—progress should be understood as an idea that is as local as it is transnational, as concrete as it is abstract, and as cultural as it is philosophical. Like narratives of history and regimes of difference, grand temporalizing ideas are widely understood to radiate out from political and intellectual centers. But for all the power and ambition of Chinese, Soviet, and Korean socialisms and Russian, Japanese, and Qing empires since the seventeenth century, their existence alone does not explain how progress became a compelling everyday framework for Hunchun people to understand their worlds, nor why it has endured despite the serial collapses of projects enacted in its name. There are today many global locations—including the old Cold War West—where progressivist visions endure despite the passing of modernist or imperial projects. But this borderland, where an extraordinary profusion of projects has converged, collided, overlapped, and collapsed, is uniquely suited for a geological approach to successive imperial formations and the layered effects that their domineering structures, cultural labor, and vernacular engagements produce (Stoler and McGranahan 2007: xi). Ethnographic study of Hunchun-rooted experiences across time provides a context from which to ask why, as Anna Tsing (2005: 21) observes dramatically, progress still controls us even in tales of ruination.

In answering this question in this book, I examine a geographical space that is centered on Hunchun but also encompasses adjacent parts of Russia and Korea (map fig. I.3) and a time frame spanning postsocialist, socialist, and imperial eras. In what is also a new kind of history of this pivotal Sino-Russo-Korean locale, I focus on both the production and the narration of temporal and political life. Historical-anthropological approaches encourage us to see telling history as a means of making political claims on the world (McGranahan 2012). Viewing the telling of time in the same way allows me to show how and why locally constructed senses of temporal movement are vital in shaping senses of Self and Other, and relations across boundaries of personal, regional, cultural, and national difference. Hunchun’s diverse local inhabitants have for generations been more than simply spectators at a series of geopolitical spectacles directed from elsewhere. Their role as protagonists in dramas that disrupt widely assumed divisions between center and periphery, vernacular and official, helps us see how progress, development, and modernity gain meaning in everyday life, and endure across shifts from one historical order to the next. Lives lived here are of course more than refractions of grand progressive schemes, and the textures of everyday temporal experience far exceed the bounds imposed by state or imperial architects. But insights into political life’s temporal inflections in light of such schemes are especially important in a contemporary global era of interethnic, international, and intercultural contact when most people—regardless of location—live amid the ruins of twentieth-century progressivisms on the frontiers of China-driven socioeconomic transformation. On the way to further discussion of what is at stake here, and this study’s implications beyond the present-day Hunchun triple border, I return briefly to madamae’s apartment and socialist time.

Even if the plumber was not Korean, he was, unlike many in town today, at least an old Hunchun person,⁷ and so could indulge madamae’s reflections on how different things had been in bygone days. The place was so dirty (maitai), they recalled. During her youth, madamae’s family lived in a small brick house with an earthen floor, actually quite practical given all the dirt, and kept a guard dog and chickens. By today’s standards, these were backward (luohou) conditions. For all madamae’s admiration of Mao, moreover, the period of the Chairman’s rule (1949–1976)—particularly his cultish apotheosis during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976)—was gripped by frenetic campaigns and bouts of anti-foreign violence, which especially threatened minority borderland residents like the Chosŏnjok (then actually still a majority of Hunchun’s population).

Yet the grimy Maoist past, in some ways best left behind, has a complicated relationship with today’s visions of progress. On one hand, advancement out of those dark days meant madamae now enjoyed once-unimaginable luxuries. Rice containing five different grains, near-limitless cabbage and radish kimchi, and fried ch’algubi red bean pancakes were once outlandish indulgences. But materiality had bred materialism, she felt. Neighborhood weddings were now serious expenses, given the hundreds of RMB expected as cash gifts. People fell out over business deals, and swindlers (pianren) were legion in Hunchun. Contemporary society’s cutthroat competitiveness meant that Byŏngnam, for all his erudition, faced